A future without key social and economic statistics for the country

Earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed bills that contains the Census Bureau’s budget, eviscerating important Census programs. For instance, House Amendment 1077, amending H.R.5326, sponsored by Rep Daniel Webster [FL-8], passed 232 – 190. Four Democrats voted YES; 10 Republicans, including, I am pleased to note, Chris Gibson, voted NO. Another amendment, approved by voice vote and sponsored by Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), was to make response to the American Community Survey voluntary.

Here’s Dr. Robert Groves of the Census Bureau:
“The Appropriations Bill eliminates the Economic Census, which measures the health of our economy. It terminates the American Community Survey, which produces the social and demographic information that monitors the impact of economic trends on communities throughout the country. It halts crucial development of ways to save money on the next decennial census. In the last three years the Census Bureau has reacted to budget and technological challenges by mounting aggressive operational efficiency programs to make these key statistical cornerstones of the country more cost efficient. Eliminating them halts all the progress to build 21st century statistical tools through those innovations. This bill thus devastates the nation’s statistical information about the status of the economy and the larger society.

“Modern societies need current, detailed social and economic statistics; the US is losing them.”

The loss of the Economic Census, which could happen under the current appropriations level, has come out every five years in recent decades to explain business activity. Its discontinuation would be a historic loss, as it has been operating in some form, since 1810.

The development of the American Community Survey came as a result of government and business users recognizing that the data collected every 10 years in the decennial Census was far too old to be usable in the later years of the cycle. The long form questions were replaced after the 2000 Census by the ACS; note that there was no long form in 2010. The article in the Bloomberg BusinessWeek tells the story:

The ACS—which has a long bipartisan history, including its funding in the mid-1990s and full implementation in 2005—provides data that help determine how more than $400 billion in federal and state funds are spent annually. Businesses also rely heavily on it to do such things as decide where to build new stores, hire new employees, and get valuable insights on consumer spending habits…

A handful of organizations that generally support big fiscal spending cuts have voiced their support for fully funding the three main data-gathering agencies: Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis…

The Chamber of Commerce, for example, strongly advocates funding them, since its members rely so much on the information they provide on basic things such as household spending, per capita income, and population estimates. The ACS is of particular value to them, says Martin Regalia, Commerce’s chief economist…

Proponents of the ACS argue that the survey is particularly important since it forms the basis of so much other data… In 2010, Reamer published a report for the Brookings Institution measuring the overall impact of the ACS.

Economists at conservative think tanks Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation all expressed support for the data-gathering agencies since all three rely heavily on the statistics they produce to study the economy. “Those agencies are essential,” says Phillip Swagel, an economist and nonresident scholar at AEI. “The data they provide really tell us what’s going on in the economy. This shouldn’t be a political issue.”

As one data user noted: “The ACS provides invaluable socio-economic data to a range of users in the public, private, and not for profit sector and its elimination (or making the survey voluntary) will have significant negative implications. Data is the cornerstone for decision making ranging from business investments to where to prioritize public expenditures to support infrastructure and service delivery programs. The losses that would occur without adequate data from which to base these critical decisions would be far greater than any savings that would occur by eliminating the survey.”

In the development of the ACS, a data expert worried at the time that the decoupling of the long form data now gathered by the ACS, from the decennial Census would put the former at risk; that now has a good chance of coming to pass.

Roger Green

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